"Engine fires, recalls and sagging sales conspire to consign Pontiac's
innovative sports car to the scrap heap."

Last week, we presented the first installment of an excerpt from
"Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry",
that detailed how Pontiac's innovative Fiero came into being. The
book, a saga of the late-1980s decline of the domestic industry and
its sub-sequent recovery, was written by the Wall Street Journal's
Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White, who earned the Pulitzer Prize
for their coverage of General Motors. Fiero, which was conceived as
a two-seat "commuter car" and evolved into a sports car against great
odds, incorporated space frame construction and labor/management
teamwork adopted by Saturn. But when sales slipped, GM abandoned the
car: This week's conclusion chronicles the chain of events leading up
to Fiero's demise.

One of Pontiac's engineers knew almost from the start of production
that the Fiero had a disquieting tendency to become, quite literally,
a hot rod. On Oct. 6, 1983, less than three months after production
began at the Pontiac plant, a Pontiac engineer wrote an ''urgent"
memo to report that two Fieros had suddenly caught fire during test
drives. The engineer blamed the fires on antifreeze leaking out of
badly installed hoses onto hot exhaust pipes. The man in charge of
the Fiero project, Hulki Aldikacti, saw a Fiero catch fire at GM's
test track.

But Fieros flamed out more than one way. Pontiac engineers fought an
18-month battle to get GM's Saginaw foundry division to stop shipping
batches of defective connecting rods for Fiero engines. The foundry
managers, who got paid on the basis of tons of iron shipped out the
door, had little financial incentive to spend money to fix Pontiac's
warranty problems. After one meeting, a Saginaw foundry manager wrote
that ''. . .60 percent to 90 percent of the rods produced do not
exhibit" defects. Of course, this meant that between one and four of
every 10 rods were defective. Pontiac was still complaining in that
''no permanent solution has been found'' to the problem of hairline
cracks in connecting rods for the Iron Duke. Sure enough, Fieros began
suffering breakdowns caused by broken rods.

A connecting rod that breaks at high speed is like a shrapnel grenade
detonating inside the motor. In Fieros, chunks of broken metal flew with
such force that they ripped through the engine block. Oil would spill
onto the hot exhaust pipes, and often ignite. The Iron Duke engines used
in early Fieros also suffered from a defect in the way their blocks were
cast that, in some cases, caused the engines to leak oil or lose coolant.
Since the Iron Dukes in Fieros ran a quart low to begin with because of
the customized oil pan, losing more oil quickly created big trouble.

GM engineers and Fiero plant workers knew of these problems and many more.
They discovered that some of the engine cooling fans on early Fieros were
wired backward. That meant the fans sucked hot air back into the engine.
Engineers rewired the fans. Pontiac engineers fired off bulletins to
dealers warning about other problems poorly installed radiator hoses,
leaky gaskets and bad wiring.

"If you wouldn't want your family riding in it, recall it.'' company
president Jim McDonald would say when asked about GM's policy toward
recalling cars. In practice, however, GM operatives were reluctant to push
for an expensive recall of a popular new model. When a Fiero burned, GM
often handled the loss as a warranty claim, and paid for repairs as each
case came in. Sometimes, GM and its insurance company quietly worked out
deals to pay off victims of Fiero fires. GM continued this approach even
as complaints about the Fiero's defects began pouring in to Pontiac and to
regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in
Washington. By the end of 1985, GM had reports of 112 Fieros that had
caught fire one for every 1700 sold at the time. By August 1986, the pace
of fire reports had quickened sharply, and Washington's safety enforcers,
the bureaucrats at the traffic safety administration, began to stir.

''This...appears to be a serious problem," wrote Philip W. Davis, NHTSA's
top defect detective, to GM in a letter demanding information on the Fiero's
problems.

This epistle confronted GM with two unpleasant choices. Recall the Fieros to
fix the fire hazard and endure a damaging public relations blow. Or circle
the wagons. GM decided to circle the wagons. Two months after NHTSA's letter
went out, GM's C. Thomas Terry, whose job it was to deal with the feds, wrote
to pooh-pooh the concern. ''Any time an individual experiences a vehicle fire,
it can be a very traumatic experience," Terry wrote. "In the case of the
[Fiero] engine compartment fires, the evidence indicates the actual risk to
motor vehicle safety is minimal."

This serene view of what it was like to have a car engine burst into flame a
foot from one's backside wasn't shared by Fiero owners who had experienced the
phenomenon. And a rapidly growing number of people were.

By the middle of 1987, the fire count for 1984 Fieros hit a rate of about 20
blazes a month. Fieros were blowing up at a rate of one for every 508 cars sold.
No other mass-market car had ever come close to this rate of fires at least, as
far as the federal safety watchdogs knew. If the Fiero fire rate was applied to
all the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour, there would be burning hulks
every quarter-mile and hundreds of people running around in panic.

As it was, victims of Fiero fires told hair-raising tales in their complaints to GM
and the government. One 22-year-old woman reported that her Fiero caught fire while
she was driving with a male friend at 4:30 a.m. on the Southern State Parkway on
Long Island. The couple wound up at the emergency room where the man got treated
for burns on hands. A Fiero owner in Missouri complained that she'd taken her car into
the dealership nine times because of electrical problems that caused her dashboard
lights to blink and the engine to sputter when she turned the headlights on Finally,
her Fiero quit running on a back road, and when she pulled over she discovered the car
was on fire. She tried to extinguish the blaze with a pair of blue jeans, but to no
avail. The car burned to the ground. This was no exaggeration. A Fiero in flames was
an amazing sight. When the plastic skin ignited, the result was a brilliant bonfire no
steel-bodied car could match.

Back at Pontiac, however, the fires were overshadowed by a more pressing concern. The
Fiero, was becoming a money loser.

Pontiac chief William Hoglund had shielded the Fiero plant from the wrath of the bean
counters when the plant fell short of its production goals in 1984, just as he had
silenced critics within Pontiac who didn't think managers should go around without
neckties. This had been easy to do, because the Fiero was a certifiable hit. By 1987,
however, things had changed. Sales had plunged from the heady peaks of the first two
years. In the 1986 model year, Fiero sales dropped to 71,283 cars, down 21 percent from
the year before. Production for the year was 21 percent below the budget forecast.
Sales in 1987 were slumping even further behind both the budget and the previous year.

Hoglund, the Fiero's champion, had been promoted to a new job. In his place GM had assigned
J. Michael Losh, an ambitious 38-year-old finance staffer who became GM's youngest vice
president when he took over Pontiac from Hoglund in July 1984. Losh's boyishly casual
public manner belied a tough way with a buck. And the Fiero was losing more bucks than
it was taking in.

The Fiero's troubles became obvious in January 1987, when GM laid off 1200 workers on the
Fiero plant's night shift. The lay off, a response to the sales slump, battered the trust
Hoglund and his staff had nurtured among union leaders. Worse was to come. Federal safety
regulators had backed GM into a corner on the issue of Fiero fires and were demanding
action. In September, GM agreed to recall all the 1984 Fieros and make repairs aimed at
reducing the fire hazard. One was installing an oil filter that gave the engine capacity
for the full four quarts of oil. Another, however, was a sticker that Fiero owners were
instructed to place on the little door that hid the cap to the gas tank. "Check engine oil
at every fuel fill," the sticker read. It was a lawyer's repair, somewhat akin to the
warning labels on the sides of cigarette packs. The sticker effectively transferred
responsibility for the Fiero's oil leaks to the owner. GM staunchly refused to admit there
was anything inherently wrong with the Fiero's design. GM's public relations operatives
knew the recall would batter the company's reputation, and the Fiero's market appeal. In
a clumsy attempt to limit the damage, GM delayed announcing the recall until 4:31 p.m.,
Nov. 25, 1987. This just happened to be the night before Thanksgiving, a time when most
auto reporters would be more interested in roasting their own turkeys instead of GM's.
The stunt didn't work. The Fiero recall generated torrents of bad press and blighted sales.
All that was left was to arrange the funeral.

In addition, GM by now knew how many labor hours it took the workers at NUMMI to assemble
a small car designed by Toyota. The Fiero factory was putting nearly twice as much labor
into its small cars and that was when the robots in the body shop worked properly and the
paint ovens weren't causing acne-like blisters in the plastic body panels. The great
Fiero experiment was now caught in a vicious downward spiral. The more GM raised its price
to cover the bloated costs, the fewer people wanted to buy the car, particularly in the
wake of the recall.

The Fiero plant union leaders fought to save the car. In early 1988, a few weeks after the
recall, a delegation from the Pontiac local tracked Losh down in a room at the Waldorf
Astoria in New York. For more than half an hour, the union men begged Losh to save the Fiero.
They talked up plans to build a hot-looking Fiero convertible. Losh promised to think about
it. In reality, there was only one thing left to say. Shortly after that, Donald Ephlin,
the UAW's top negotiator at GM, walked into a lunch meeting with the labor relations staff
at the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada Group headquarters in Warren, Mich. Sitting beside the
labor staffers were Robert Schultz, the vice president in charge of the group, and David
Campbell, the group's manufacturing boss. The two men hadn't been expected. Their presence
spelled trouble. Just hours before, Ephlin had been warned that the Fiero was in jeopardy.
Now, Schultz and Campbell delivered the blow: The Fiero would die at the end of the model
year in the fall.

"Boy," Ephlin snapped. "It went downhill fast. It was sick this morning, and now it's dead."
"When should we tell employees?" one of the CPC men asked. "It's too late," Ephlin said.
"You should have told them long ago."

For Ephlin, this was a tragedy. For four years, he had held the Fiero up as a model of what
cooperative labor relations could achieve. He had staked his reputation and his union career
on labor-management partnership, which he referred to as "jointness." Now, GM was knifing
jointness in the back. But Ephlin was powerless to stop it. On March 1, David Campbell marched
on to a podium in the Fiero factory and delivered the plant's death sentence in a terse
announcement. A murmur of shock rippled through the crowd. A solitary voice boomed: "Boo!"
Then, the workers turned and walked back to their stations.

That wasn't the last word on the Fiero, however. Not by a long shot. In December 1989, GM
recalled every one of the 244,000 four-cylinder Fieros it had built to fix problems that
caused fires. Four months later, GM recalled every single Fiero six cylinder and four
cylinder to make more repairs. Inside GM, the Fiero had been a bright symbol of GM's new wave.
Aldikacti's product team and the people at the Fiero factory had, indeed, been years ahead
of their time. But the failure of their car to survive the compromises demanded by the GM
system turned their success into just another Detroit flop.

The crowning indignity came in 1989, when tiny Mazda Motor Corp. launched a little two-seat
roadster called the Miata. The day the Fiero's death was announced, Mike Losh had insisted
that the Fiero failed not because of quality problems, but because Americans had lost interest
in two-seater cars. Mazda made a mockery of Losh's excuse. With its simple technology and
exterior lines that echoed the British Triumph and MG roadsters of the 1960s, the Miata
became an instant smash hit. At the peak of the Miata frenzy, buyers were offering to pay
$4,000 or more over sticker to get one of the retromobiles. Sighed one gloomy Pontiac
official: "The Fiero could have been a Miata.''

Copyright 1994 by Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White, reprinted with the permission of
Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc.

my kid burned up my 87se v6 auto at about 90k miles
wires shorted so cause wasNOT leaking oil or coolent

car was driven from miami to near NY NY without problem
but caught on fire being driven at speed on an exway in northern NJ
cold weather may have had a roll in the fire

do to the distance from home [miami] the car was given away

I looked in my rear view mirror and saw an orange red glow. I opened the rear and flames shot out.

I thought the same thing and was going to install the inner fenders for the reason. But fenders are not an inspected item on a Missouri state inspection. I have checked with three inspection sites on it.

Ray B, do you know if Fiero Jon ended up with it? I bought a partially burnt engine from him a few years ago, it was an 87 2.8 auto that he said was from florida and caught on fire in Northern NJ.